Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019 ed. by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

Abstract

Reviewed by: Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019 ed. by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain Don Polite Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019. Edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. (New York: One World, 2021. Pp. xviii, 504. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-0-5934-4934-9; cloth, $32.00, ISBN 978-0-5931-3404-7.) In Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019, editors Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain have undertaken and accomplished a project of vision and service. The work, in plainest terms, is a history of the African American community over four centuries. However, the artistry of this project is not simply in attempting to create a single cohesive narrative of this four-hundred-year period. Rather, in marking the quadricentennial of the birth of the community of African America, they have compiled a tapestry of voices and writers who depict a richness in how history can be told and what history can mean to a community. The heart of this work is the collection of writers in this project. In covering the four hundred years from 1619 to 2019, Four Hundred Souls is split into ninety pieces. Beginning with acclaimed writer Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project, these writers represent a remarkable cross section of the Black community. The contributors are a who's who of African America. There are academics such as Jennifer L. Morgan, Christopher J. Lebron, Deirdre Cooper Owens, Blair L. M. Kelley, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. There are prominent journalists such as Adam Serwer, Wesley Lowery, and Jamelle Bouie. Activists and public writers such as Clint Smith and Alicia Garza are present. The writers come from many walks of life, spanning careers, generations, viewpoints, sexual orientations, and gender identities. Yet they come together, each covering a five-year period in pieces of roughly equal length, with unique contributions to this composite retelling of the place of African America in the United States. [End Page 593] Fascinating in this composite community narrative is the flexibility of storytelling choice and voice. Each of the pieces is centered on a singular person, place, idea, or event. Additionally, the edited volume is organized into separate parts, each encompassing a forty-year period, bookended by a poem that captures that span in verse. In Part 1 of the book, Ijeoma Oluo puts her own racial identity as Black center stage in conversation with a 1630 Virginia colonial court that whipped a white man for sleeping with a Black woman. On a different note, in "The Black Family," Heather Andrea Williams shows the many ways African Americans attempted to protect their children from enslavement, including using baptism as a way to secure freedom. Likewise, Williams shows how laws were changed to close "baptism loopholes" and eliminate paths for freedom (p. 27). The flexibility of author choice allows for a richness of ideas to be explored. With such an array of writers and the flexibility of topics covered over four centuries, the range of themes covered and discussions entered are wide. For example, Jennifer Morgan shows through the figure of a single African American woman, Elizabeth Keye, how racial slavery was firmly established in Virginia, with status at childbirth coming from the legal status of freedom or enslavement of the mother. Reconsiderations of Bacon's Rebellion by Heather C. McGhee and of colonial gun laws by Kellie Carter Jackson show both the centrality of Virginia as a laboratory for new laws to govern the enslaved in colonial America and the constant legal maneuvering to stamp out freedom. Repeatedly, the pieces put at center stage that enslavement was dynamic, with people at the center. White Americans and legal institutions were constantly rethinking and adjusting the framework to build up the strength and stability of racial oppression. Black people sought to define their freedom. In bringing the history of the African American community in the United States to the present day, each writer, even in discussing what seems like distant history, either implicitly hints at the present or explicitly references the present. The success of this work is in the...